CERCA SERIES: NINA KATCHADOURIAN AT MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO
Art Daily
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May 26 2008
SAN DIEGO, CA.- Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presents Cerca
Series: Nina Katchadourian, on view through July 6, 2008. For more
than 15 years, New York artist Nina Katchadourian has investigated
codes of expression, language, and translation, creating a body of
work that emphasizes equally successful communicative exchanges as
miscommunication, misreadings, and illegibility. Born in California to
her Finnish-Swedish mother and Armenian-Turkish father, Katchadourian’s
work often links language and signage to heritage and lineage.
Cerca Series: Nina Katchadourian will present the six-channel video
piece Accent Elimination (2005), a work that explores cultural
assimilation and speech as heirloom. Inspired by posters advertising
"accent elimination" courses, the artist worked with her parents and
a professional speech improvement coach for several weeks in order
to "neutralize" her parents’ accents and then learn each of their
distinct accents herself. The multi-channel piece documents the
process of unlearning and relearning the three of them underwent,
revealing their struggle to hear and imitate something so familiar
yet so difficult to reproduce.
The other work in the exhibition, entitled Zoo (2007), consists of
footage shot in eight different zoos over the past six years. It is
presented at MCASD Downtown as a 19-channel projection and monitor
installation that will occupy the entire Royston Gallery at 1001
Kettner. Footage of various animals and zoo settings throughout the
world is edited to recreate an artificial animal environment marked
by visual as well as acoustic recordings that play concurrently to
create a sense of disorientation and disjunction.
Cerca Series: Nina Katchadourian is made possible by a grant from the
LLWW Foundation and gifts to MCASD’s Annual Fund. Programs at MCASD
Downtown are made possible, in part, by grants from The James Irvine
Foundation, the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture,
and the County of San Diego.